Windows Live email addresses – Part 3

By Chris on December 16, 2006 8:30 PM

28 comments

19/12 Update: This has stopped working now.

—

Looks like Christmas has come early for those Windows Live users who haven’t got an @live.com email address yet. PicturePan2, the “unofficial LiveSide correspondent for China” has just posted a new way to register the Windows Live email address of your choice, provided you have Firefox or Opera installed. (You can use the nifty portable Firefox if you don’t wish to install another browser.)

Visit http://domains.live.com
Choose “Get Started” then type in a domain of your choice eg “test123.com”, and press “Continue”
Choose “Create a new Windows Live ID in your domain” then press “Continue”
In Firefox, go to “View – Page Style – No style”
Now select the @live.com domain from the drop down menu
Important: To be able to receive emails to this account, you must login to mail.live.com with your new email address to activate it

Pictures can be found over at source.

Update: Read the comments if you want help on how to get localised Windows Live email addresses eg @live.co.uk.

Note1: This could stop working at any time and most likely will do.
Note2: As was stated after the last hack, you risk losing your @live.com email address if you abuse the signup for spam purposes. However it was confirmed that regular users are safe.

Posted in News | Tags: Hotmail, Windows Live

Comments

bf1977

huahuahua Everybody wants to have @live.com, this is what it matters!
Namgo

This on digg http://digg.com/tech_news/Windows_Live_email_address_hack_3

Thanks for help!
statm1

About time I got a @live account.. Ive been to slow in the previous hacks that have surfaced.. So has it been officially said that MS will eventually let you switch everything on your hotmail account to your live account?
Chris

Nothing official has been said, no.
http://www.infoblog.us zxocuteboy

Anyway i can port my hotmail account to live? Even if i have to choose a new email but i would have to lose all my hotmail and wlm contacts.
Chris

There is no official migration method at the moment. However you can do the following:

Add both hotmail and live email accounts to Windows Live Mail Desktop. Then move the emails you have in the hotmail account to the live account.

Contacts can be moved by exporting them from Windows Live Messenger and then importing them. You can find both options for doing this at the bottom of the Contacts menu in Messenger.

Emails sent to the hotmail account will not forward to the live account though.
simseb

Nice, I’m on time this time. :)
Works with localized versions too.
statm1

Well, I didnt really mean contacts and email. I was mainly referring to my MS Connect account. But thanks anyway.
cleitondj

Microsoft …………it blocked again!! grrrrrrr
destinio

Weired….I just successfully registered one, even I saw the error message!! But I cannot register another using the same method! I don’t know what I did to avoid the error message!

I need to figure it out…
destinio

I did step 4 “view->page style->no style” just before step 2. I think it is a better way. Then this method works well. But only “live.com” is available. In my drop-down list, there is no other domains. But I just figured out how to register an address at another @live.sth domain, say @live.cn (for China). It seems that live.com can show different content depending on the brower’s language preferece.

Before taking steps described in this article, I first do this: in Firefox, Tools->Options->Advanced->Edit Language->add Chinese/china (zh-cn)->DONE.
Then I typed in http://domains.live.com and followed those steps, the available domain became “@live.cn”. Here it is.
Starry

I cannot register. Does it work now? When I went to step 3, there was just a DNS checking, and I cannot get through.
statm1

I havent tried to get a second one.. But as far as I know this still works if you use Opera and you dont even have to change the stylesheet.. You only get live.com though..
Chris

Destinio thanks for that tip.

Statm1 you can migrate your Microsoft Connect account just by contacting the Connect team: http://connect.microsoft.com/ContactUs.aspx

To confirm, this is still working at the time of posting this comment.
http://www.msgstuff.com the andyman

What about migrating Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Ideas information (and other Windows Live services account info for that matter)?
statm1

Thanks for telling me Chris.. I appreciate it!
Pal

another easy way to localize your email address is that, you add your locale code just after the url http://domains.live.com as:
http://domains.live.com?mkt=en-gb —-get @live.co.uk
http://domains.live.com?mkt=de-de —-get @live.de
…..

this might be easier than every time you change your browser’s language setting :)
check more local codes here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms145903.aspx
http://Abid phool4fool

Great work Pal!
Thanks a lot!
I was bit late in 2nd exploit…Now I got with my name…hehehehehe
very happy…..thanks
alexandre

The question is, though regular users are indeed safe, as Kevin said, they are going to keep an eye on the behavior of these “illegimate” accounts. What does this mean? Are they going to read their mails to assure they are not spams or are they going to check IPs of each mail sent and received? The good thing is spam can be prevented, but meanwhile the bad thing is these “users’” privacy might be seen by others, does it mean that “illegal users’” privacy can be legally “violated”?
cleitondj

Working…
Error
We are working to fix a temporary problem with our sign-up service.
Please try again.

If you continue to get this error try again later.
OK
Error code:100
Chris

cleitondj: the error message doesn’t seem to mean much – signup is still working.

alexandre: I’ve seen on some forums that users with @live.com accounts have received seemingly random requests from Microsoft to activate their accounts (click a link). I doubt they are doing any more than this at this time as there is still the captcha to complete when registereding new accounts.

If they started doing the things you suggest, I think they know they’d loose users in the millions very very quickly!

Again this is still working at the time of this comment.
alexandre

Dear Chris: Your remark sounds pretty reasonable and I agree. But I still doubt if users can really know what their email companies are doing to their accounts, not only for live, but for every email provider. I am being a paranoid!:) However, most likely is that these users would be completely accepted by live to be legal ones, there remains a problem. For example, if I have an id@hotmail.com account and someone has already registered for an id@live.com, what could I do when live allows open signups and I am ready to upgrade my hotmail to live? Older hotmail users would certainly cliam that they have priority over these early acquired accounts. How would live solve this problem? Are they going to develope a technology which can… kind of allow old users’ applications “override” early acquired accounts? As an old hotmail users I definitely hate to be merely able to upgrade to an idXXX@live.com.
statm1

Just out of curiosity.. Does live mail have .us addresses? Because I think that would be kinda cool to have as well.
Chris

Live Mail doesn’t have .us now, no.

The migration policy for hotmail->live is still an unknown, so anything I say is not fact. That said, I cannot see them automatically moving ID@hotmail.com to ID@live.com. Mainly because there can’t be enough @live accounts to replace all the hotmail and msn accounts that exist already. I also can’t see them evicting early Windows Live signups. You only have to think of the PR disaster these actions would cause to see why it’s unlikely they’d do it.
CraigB

You can’t upgrade @hotmail.com to a live account anyways. Just like you can “upgrade” a @hotmail.com to @msn.com. Upgrading is only for that particular account, and gives you the extra benefits of paying and whatnot. If you have “johndoe@hotmail.com”, you can’t upgrade it to “johndoe@live.com”
alexandre

Thanks all! I think our concern and enthusiasm for Microsoft and other companies is the impetus of the development of the internet business. I read in some forums of my country suggesting that live.com mail is becoming extremely hot and popular because of the “crazy” registration flood of new accounts. Personally I have been using hotmail since the 90′s so I have personal attachment to it although I also possess and enjoy other emails too. I think the charm & appeal of a email to users is not how short and cool the usernames are, but how nice it functions to service. After this idea I think registration of live accounts is not at all a big problem for Microsoft as long as its service is good. Anyway these accounts are free and it does not matter to Microsoft who are using it; they cannot get any cent from users’ identities but they can get a wealth from the amount of user number. The most important thing for MS is dealing with PR with its free users to keep a large herd. We can see people using hotmail and msn emails with super long usernames, that’s a proof that people will use live mail even if they can only get long usernames if the service is nice. Anyway good luck to Microsoft and its rivals because their competition is making life easier. Thanks to them all!
cleitondj

According to Messers Tutsumi and Maxtoid, the hack has now been disabled.

source: mess.be
alexandre

Whew! Stopped doubting about privacy! It seems that MSN hotmail has a very nice and clean record on user privacy at least in information written in my language. Paranoid Alexandre:)

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